Recommended Reading for Junior PMs

The purpose of non-fiction reading is to learn. When learning, it’s useful to organize incoming knowledge by what questions it answers. Here are the questions I think are important, with links to the answers that resonate with my personal experience.

What is my job and how do I do it?

This is a beast of a question, so breaking this into two smaller questions.

• What is the role of a PM?
• First, Shreyas Doshi.

• Marty Cagan’s definition from Inspired: “The product manager has two key responsibilities: assessing product opportunities, and defining the product to be built.”
• This is another example where I prefer Shreyas’ definition of the role to Marty Cagan’s. While they overlap on product definition, Shreyas focuses more on coordinating actions and Cagan more on understanding the opportunities in the market. While product includes both, Junior PMs tend to do more coordination so that definition is more helpful to them. Truly independent assessment of product opportunities is a big important problem that’s generally tackled by Product Leaders & CEOs.
• What are the skillsets needed to be a good PM?
• In arguably my all-time favorite post on Product, Mat Balez beautifully lays out what Shreyas means by “coordinating actions across the org”. Influencing without power, responsibility over success or failure, communication and prioritization skills feature prominently. While the high-level is not unique, the descriptions are made with the depth and humor of someone who’s clearly been lived it. Jives very closely with my early experience as a PM.
• If you’re more into MECE (mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive) models, Matt LeMay’s CORE has got your back. CORE is an acronym for four skillsets of PMs:
• Communication: No one should have to ask a product manager what to do; the product manager’s job is to create a system where they don’t have to intervene.
• Execution: Product managers need to be willing to do whatever it takes to make their products successful
• Organization: Change the rules, don’t break the rules.
• Research: Seek out different sources of information on how to provide value and put them together in the optimal way

How do I get hired as a PM?

• Read Cracking the Product Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. Beyond standard interview prep like nailing and personalizing your personal pitch and telling stories in the STARS format, it depends on the company. Rule of thumb is that companies are like their founders, so MBA founded companies tend to like MBAs, Engineering PhDs like Engineering PhDs, etc. For Startups, consider showing genuine passion for the space.
• I talk smack about growth teams sometimes, but this Reforge article is solid.
• “Success with interviewing reflects not just on how good or relevant your skills for the job opportunity are, but also how well you can market this to the prospective employer. In reality, most people underestimate the marketing component. So they think it is 10% marketing and 90% your capabilities, when in reality the mix shift is more equal.”
• The above is correct, and most people are bad at personal marketing. Beyond marketing though, building up verifiable evidence beyond the interview is useful.
• If I were starting out now, I would probably join as an adjacent position (User Research, Customer Success, Engineering or Design) at a startup and then just start doing product work until they made it official.

I got hired but my job description is unclear! What work should I focus on?

• In any new job, the best starting point is understanding your boss’ context then figuring out how to make their job easier.
• The LNO from Shreyas is useful and it’s worth reading the full thread. It restates the role of Product in a way some find more actionable. Basically, your top priority is defining a product and moving it forward. While it is useful to build up influence (aka Proof of Worth), your value is ultimately measured by products/features brought to the market.

https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1223816226918453253

• What do I need to learn?
• There’s this tired diagram that used to get shown around all the time where Product is the overlap of Tech, UX/Design and Business. It’s some variant of the one below. As a young PM I would get really frustrated that this description isn’t very actionable, but in terms of high-level areas to learn about after maximizing on-the-job skillsets, it’s a useful guide.

• Which one you focus on and how to best learn it are highly dependent on how you learn and what you want to do. My personal experience is that early on my career understanding the technology was most important. The ordered value of each was Tech > UX > Business. Later in my career that flipped to become Business > UX > Tech.
• An important component that isn’t listed here is being able to do a little bit of the different cross-functional teams you interact with. This can include Sales & Marketing, Finance, or Customer Success. It’s worth deeply understanding the job of any group you interact with, ideally by trying to do it yourself. It helps understand their context, culture, and increases your holistic understanding of the business.

What does a successful product career look like?

• That depends on what you want. Many CEOs of successful tech companies started out as PMs. Some people and move to other roles, generally ones that are less intense. This can result in a focus on marketing or project management. Some people start their own start-up. It’s not a low-stress job, so my advice would be not to do it for the career, but because living it sounds like fun.